The stoves have become the way of life of the Lanzaroteño chef Daniel Cáceres (Femés, 1999) since he left for Salamanca to study a career and realized that it was not his thing. After leaving these university studies, he decided to return to Lanzarote where he began to work as a waiter in one of the restaurants in Femés. There he discovered what he was truly passionate about, cooking.
As a result, he made the decision to study the Higher Degree in Kitchen Management at IES Zonzamas, which opened the doors to the working world. "Although I have always liked cooking, I never considered dedicating myself to it because it has always had the reputation of being a very hard and sacrificing profession, so I preferred a quieter job, but the training I saw caught my attention so much that it was worth it," he begins explaining in an interview with La Voz
The restaurant Atelier, by the renowned chef Ramón Freixa and which has two Michelin stars, is where the Lanzarote native has managed to make a niche for himself, working side by side with one of the greatest experts in the world of cuisine at a national level. This restaurant is characterized by being very intimate and is in the same premises as Tradiciones, the other restaurant of the Spanish chef, but separate from it, having only a bar for ten people.
His studies at IES Zonzamas led him to do his internships at a restaurant in Playa Honda, whose owner worked with chef Ramón Freixa. As a result, he contacted the chef and did his internships with him. "What was going to be two months has become two years," he reveals.
Good treatment and demand
The Lanzaroteño assures that one of the things for which he wanted to work at Atelier is Ramón Freixa's good reputation. "He is not like the rest of the Michelin chefs who are very strict, he is not like that at all because he lets you develop a lot and listens to all your ideas and what you propose, even though he is the one in charge," he says.
This good treatment and work environment makes "the level of demand that they ask of you is compensated by how well they treat you because you don't feel at any moment that they take advantage of you".
Working in a restaurant of this level is "strange" for Cáceres, as celebrities from all over Spain come to the restaurant to meet him. "Interns come to work with Freixa like I did at the time and being already from the inside you see it with different eyes because you are no longer the one who comes from afar, but now you are the one who is at home... they come to work with Ramón and with us because we are an extension of him in the kitchen and we make sure things are done as he wants", he explains.
Apart from the wide variety of techniques that the young man has learned working hand in hand with the coveted chef, he also highlights the learning in the way of working, organization, seriousness, discipline, and involvement. "It's not just doing eight hours and leaving, but you really feel part of something very big and this makes you want everything to go very well and you dedicate all your attention to it... you go home thinking about how I can reorganize to be faster or more efficient the next day and in that process you discover tricks," he explains.
A menu made up of 17 courses
The restaurant Atelier is open four days a week only and offers a 17-course tasting menu. In the kitchen there are four people who are in charge of preparing this set menu. The establishment also has the vegan menu option.
"It seems like a very intimate and very cool project to me because as Ramón Freixa has been in gastronomy for so many years, his cuisine has a great personality, it is very his own and you immediately recognize his dishes," he points out.
The gastronomy they offer is very French and Catalan, since the chef is Catalan and trained in France. "The dishes have a lot of French influence, like a lot of cream and butter, and the menus change because we use a lot of seasonal products," he declares.
Ramón Freixa's dishes are very classic, "but if you analyze them you see that in all the preparations of each one of them you eat the product as is, it's not like in other Michelin-starred dishes where you don't know what you're eating because there are too many flavors at once".
This cooking makes him a very respectful chef of the product and tradition, since his motto is that "without tradition there is no avant-garde".
"Lanzarote needs a fish grill"
Looking ahead, Cáceres assures he is very focused on his work at Atelier because he has had great professional evolution within it. However, in the long term, he would like to return to the Canary Islands and bring all the acquired knowledge. Of course, he emphasizes "achieving good working conditions on the islands," something that is sometimes difficult.
Regarding the "gastronomic situation" of Lanzarote, the young Lanzaroteño states that "a bit of evolution is noticeable, although there is still a long way to go". "More interesting restaurants are opening on the island and in a few years we will be better positioned," he points out.
Regarding the cuisine I would make on the island, he reveals that "what is needed in Lanzarote is a good fish grill". "To take a fresh fish, cure it, dry it, grill it with its pilpil and present it like that with nothing else is something that I believe no restaurant on the island does and it is something very simple, you just have to know how to work the embers and give the fish good cooking", he continues
And it is that as this cook says, "one can achieve a very good result with the quality of the product from Lanzarote".
